By: Becky Bracken

Binge viewing. If you've never tried it, you totally should. For the unfortunate uninitiated, binge watching is the delicious experience of viewing two or more episodes of an on-demand show online, in a single sitting. No DVDs, no program schedule, just you and House of Cards for hours. And according to Netflix, binge viewing shows no signs of abating. A survey conducted by Harris Interactive on behalf of Netflix shows 61 percent of online TV viewers binge watch their favorite shows. The technological hero behind the rise of the binge viewing: Content Delivery Networks (CDN).

Besides binge viewing, the moment for online video has finally arrived. So much so that top-tier programming can be produced and distributed solely online. Forget appointment television. Forget big, bloated networks. The evolution of online video, thanks largely in part to ever-better CDNs, has unleashed a new era in how media is consumed: mobile, on demand, anywhere. 

Even programs available on broadcast and cable television see their audiences moving en masse to the web. The March 9^th,2014 season finale of True Detective crashed HBO Go. On April 6^th, 2014 the premier of the blockbuster series Game of Thrones brought HBO Go to its knees once again. Forget appointment television. Forget big, bloated networks. 

The demand for CDN solutions to supercharge video delivery has never been hotter. MRG predicts double digit growth in the CDN market from $65 million in 2013 to $460 million in 2017. Operators know CDNs are where the future of making content distribution affordable lives and are employing a variety of strategies to get in on the action as quickly as possible.

When the customer pulls up a video, the idea behind a CDN is to have that video, or other media stored at the edge of the network, as close as possible to the end user so that the video travels as little distance as possible to get to the consumer. The result is a faster, better, cleaner video Quality of Experience (QoE) for the customer and lower cost to the network operator, because that video is traveling a shorter distance each time its viewed.

CDN evolution

Frank Childs, who heads Marketing for Carrier Products at Akamai Technologies which handles 15 to 30 percent of all internet traffic at any given moment, says his company has seen a clear evolution in how operators and service providers approach CDNs. Operators first turned to CDNs to handle the glut of OTT video traffic on their networks and built them in-house. But it became quickly apparent, Childs says, that home grown CDN solutions wouldn't cut it.

“A bit delivery service does not a CDN make,” Childs says.

He adds that enhanced services like SSL, site acceleration and the ability to handle encrypted videos are becoming increasingly necessary to the business. This realization has ushered in an area of partnership between CDN and network providers as a means to accomplish three distinct goals quickly.

“Partnerships make the most sense,"Childs says. “First you instantly get traffic on the network. Second, you can start leveraging best-of-breed video services for your own subscribers and enhance your offering, like adding TV-Everywhere. Finally, you can monetize those services by re-selling them to enterprise.” Akamai has forged a relationship with AT&T to handle the CDN laying over its IP network.